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I love SQL Server execution plans. It is often easy to spot the cause of a performance problem just by looking at one. The task is considerably easier if the plan includes run-time information (a so-called ‘actual’ execution plan), but even a compiled plan can be very useful. Nevertheless, there are still times where the execution plan does not ...

Most tuning efforts for data-changing operations concentrate on the SELECT side of the query plan. Sometimes people will also look at important storage engine considerations like locking and transaction log throughput that can have dramatic effects. As a consequence, a number of common practices have emerged, such as avoiding large numbers of ...

This post is for SQL Server developers who have experienced the special kind of frustration, which only comes from spending hours trying to convince the query optimizer to generate a parallel execution plan. This situation often occurs when making an apparently innocuous change to the text of a moderately complex query; a change which ...